McMullen Circle

By Heather Newton

The twelve linked stories in McMullen Circle explore the intertwined lives of faculty families at the McMullen Boarding School in Tonola Falls, Georgia in 1969 and 1970. The school community is isolated and idyllic, yet issues of race and the Vietnam War still intrude. Does heroism require physical prowess, or is there valor in a cafeteria worker enduring a cluttered, needy life with her four young sons, or an elderly librarian caring for her disabled lesbian partner? What does it take for a young African American girl to find the courage to assert her right to attend the all-white private school. The stories in this collection ask what, and who, are the real heroes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regal House Publishing
• Release date: Jan 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781646031016

Book preview

9781646031016.jpg

Contents

Praise for McMullen Circle

McMullen Circle

Copyright © 2022 Heather Newton. All rights reserved.

Dedication

Prelude

Wild Things

McMullen Circle

Tupelo Rose

The Stole

Once and Always

The Preferred Embodiment

Good Boys

Things Summoned

Twilight Song

Wish I May

Breaking Bread

The Walk

Breath

Acknowledgments

Praise for McMullen Circle

These deeply literary, heartfelt, and heartbreaking characters call to mind the work of Elizabeth Strout, Gail Godwin, and Richard Russo, but Heather Newton is her own writer. Her characters are shot through with longing and hope, and in this small community we watch as big dreams and big desires are dreamed and felt, run toward and away from. This is the kind of book that readers return to to reemerge themselves in Newton’s world, and it’s also the kind of book that writers return to to see how she pulled it off.

—Wiley Cash, author of A Land More Kind Than Home, This Dark Road to Mercy, and The Last Ballad

"In McMullen Circle, Heather Newton’s riveting novel in short story form, compelling and believably flawed characters inhabit Tonola Falls, Georgia, a small town on the cusp of integration. In a dozen connected stories, Newton weaves a tapestry of rich irony with fierce emotion and genuine bewilderment. Ordinary people, animated with astounding power, confront their weaknesses and principles in a baffling, rapidly changing world. Empathy and insight are forces as powerful as the stone mountain that supports and looms over these unforgettable stories."

—Anna Jean Mayhew, author of The Dry Grass of August and Tomorrow’s Bread

At turns dreamy and dark, Newton turns a deft eye toward the inhabitants of a small southern town on the cusp of turmoil—both in their inner lives and in the changing world around them—leaving the reader entranced.

—Kelly J. Ford, author of Cottonmouths

"Clear-sighted, restrained, deceptively simple, and eternally charitable, the stories that comprise McMullen Circle cohere deftly to create a devastating, life-affirming, vibrating, multi-voiced whole."

—Jen Fawkes, author of Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil Told Me

"Heather Newton is a beautiful writer and McMullen Circle is a beautiful book, written with compassion, humor and unflinching honesty. I love these stories, and as standalone pieces, each is compelling in its own way, often breathtakingly so. And read as a whole, the stories transcend the individual characters, offering a complex, conflicted and empathetic portrait of this North Georgia boarding school and its community. The whole time I was reading McMullen Circle, I was reminded again and again of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. "

—Tommy Hays, author of The Pleasure Was Mine

"Heather Newton is a master at capturing the mood and longing of the late sixties, early seventies, and the isolation of a boarding school in the North Georgia mountains where the children run free and the headmaster’s wife goes in search of a television. When the Cordelia Six are arrested for firebombing a nearby theater that wouldn’t admit Black teenagers, the striations of race become wider and insistent. In this linked collection, the stories often turn on what is overheard or understood only by some or even on a simple gesture, and Newton’s carefully crafted sentences place discovery and feeling squarely in the heart of the reader. McMullen Circle is forged out of our past, but this is a collection for now.

—Cynthia Newberry Martin, author of Tidal Flats

McMullen Circle

Heather Newton

Regal House Publishing

Copyright © 2022 Heather Newton. All rights reserved.

Published by

Regal House Publishing, LLC

Raleigh, NC 27612

All rights reserved

ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781646030767

ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646031016

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948463

All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.

Interior by Lafayette & Greene

Cover images © by C. B. Royal

Regal House Publishing, LLC

https://regalhousepublishing.com

The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

For Craig, Erin, and Michele.

Prelude

The mountain feels them walking on its surface. Their feet are part of its wearing down. Feet and wind and freeze and thaw and streams that carry its dust to the sea.

The mountain remembers the violence that came before the wearing down, when plates collided and seas opened and closed. Slivers of ocean floor still stripe its belly. It feels the ghostly ache of a piece ripped off and lodged to the south where the sun burns hot.

That age of tearing, of welding and suturing, is past. Now the mountain rests in a stillness which isn’t still, but slow, invisibly slow, and it has time to watch and listen.

Wild Things

In some species of annuals, it is the parent plant that leaves the child, the dry stalks blowing away, leaving seeds in the soil.

—Edible Wild Plants of North Georgia by Simon Fisher

Prince Charles’s investiture as the Prince of Wales would take place Tuesday, and Sarah had no place to watch it. All she wanted was a color television with decent reception, in the company of someone she could stand, to see Queen Elizabeth crown the young prince on the lawn of Caernarfon Castle. Their home didn’t have a television because Sarah’s husband, Richard, the headmaster of the McMullen Boarding School in Tonola Falls, Georgia, thought television rotted the brain.

Sarah walked along the circular paved road that ran in front of the school’s administration building and ringed the campus. Faculty houses along the circle faced inward so teachers could monitor the dorms, but the students were on summer break and she was alone on the road. She had a book in her hand, Edible Wild Plants of North Georgia, but she wasn’t reading it. She wanted to see the coronation, or investiture, whatever it was called. Sarah had been to Caernarfon Castle. When she was sixteen and in North Wales as an exchange student, she had leaned against the cold stone sill of one of the castle’s tower windows, with a young man named Owen, the son of her host family, standing behind her with his arms around her waist. Light braided silver on the sea beyond the castle, and the grass was an impossible green in the courtyard below. She remembered the Keep Off the Grass signs in Welsh, Peidiwch a mynd ar y borva, as Owen traced the curve of her breasts with his thumbs. She had felt exotic and lovely then, something she didn’t feel now, and she wanted to see that place again.

She reached her own house. Her daughter, Lorna, almost ten, was in the front yard showing her friend Chase Robbins how to do a back bend. Lorna wore purple nylon socks that Sarah hadn’t been able to talk her out of that morning. When she bent backward her hair trailed the grass and her tie-dyed T-shirt came up, showing her ribs.

I’ve got a job for you, Sarah said.

We don’t want a job, Chase said. Lorna struggled up from her back bend.

A fun job, Sarah said. I’ve got this book about wild plants you can eat. I thought you two could pick some dandelion greens for me. They’re all over the backyard. You can pretend you’re gathering food to survive in the wilderness.

That got Chase interested. Well, okay, he said.

In the backyard Sarah showed them how to pick the newer greens, then went inside. She laid the edible plant book on the kitchen counter and looked out the window. Lorna and Chase had found a plastic flowerpot to collect the greens. They were at it in earnest, kneeling on the ground with Lorna’s brown hair nearly touching Chase’s red.

Sarah was having an affair with Chase’s father, Art Robbins, the chemistry teacher. She had opened a flirtation with Art because no one else was available. She’d played him, reeling him in over a period of weeks with a skirt slit just so, hair tossed to release the smell of her shampoo. By the time she got him alone he was drooling. They screwed in the riskiest places she could find—once on the empty concrete bleachers of the football field at midnight, another time standing up against the tiled wall of the boys’ locker room, with the smell of chlorine from the swimming pool stinging her nostrils. Art was nothing special. He mouth-breathed when they had sex and she could hardly bear to kiss him, but he served a need. He added an illusion of excitement for a while, and gave her something with which to hurt her husband Richard.

Lorna and Chase brought their full container of greens inside. Sarah put them in the sink to wash.

Do you want to stay for lunch, Chase?

Chase eyed the greens. No, thanks, he said. See you later.

Sarah heated up chicken noodle soup and fixed a salad with the dandelion greens. On top she shaved cucumber and radishes from a neighbor’s garden and garnished it with nasturtium blossoms. It was really very pretty. When she heard Richard open the front door, she called Lorna to the table.

Richard walked into the kitchen and washed his hands at the sink. His had buttoned his white shirt at the sleeves and neck and fastened his tie with a McMullen School tiepin even though there were no students around to see him. She had once found that formality attractive, when she was a freshman at St. Mary’s, a two-year women’s college in Pennsylvania, and he was her professor. Now it was hard to remember why.

She put the soup on the table and broached the subject of a television. I was wondering if we might rent a color TV, just for a day, so I can watch them crown the Prince of Wales.

It wouldn’t work, Richard said. The reception’s so bad up here. You’d need an outside antenna.

I suppose you’re right. Stone encased the school campus, the buildings and walls blending into the mountain behind them. Without an antenna, installed with arms outstretched in a T on the roof of the house, airwaves couldn’t get through.

Richard and Lorna sat down to eat. Sarah put the dandelion salad in the middle of the table.

What’s that? Richard said.

Wild dandelion green salad, from a book I picked up at the health food store. I thought we could try something new.

Lorna picked a leaf out of the bowl and tasted the tip.

How is it? Sarah said.

Okay, Lorna said loyally. A little fuzzy.

Richard reached over and lifted some salad onto his plate. The greens were tough and he chewed for a long time.

It’s a bit late in the season, Sarah said. They’d be more tender right when they come out.

He got up and went to the refrigerator, took out a head of iceberg lettuce and a bottle of Thousand Island dressing, and sat back down.

Lorna looked at Sarah.

You don’t have to finish it, Sarah said.

All the girls in Sarah’s college dorm thought the new English professor was handsome. Richard Pierce was tall and serious, his hair already receding in his late twenties, with a way of listening attentively to even the silliest young women in his class. Sarah found him far more interesting than the boys who drove over from the coed college across the river for group dates on Saturday nights.

He’s so distinguished, breathed her suite mate, Mitzi.

Of the four girls in their suite, Sarah intended to be the one to win the young professor’s attention—not plain Mitzi of the books and unshaped eyebrows, or icy Charlotte who was saving herself for marriage. And Richard was too solemn for Babs.

She started by loosening her top button so that her blouse opened to a shadow of breast when he stood over her handing back a paper. She could tell he noticed by the extra seconds he let pass before he moved on to the next student. She met his eyes as he lectured, causing him to fumble and drop his chalk. She rested her pencil eraser on her lower lip and smoothed her hair behind her ear just so. She stayed after class pretending to need help deciphering his written comments on her essay. Her upper arm touched his as he translated. He didn’t move away. When she was sure she had him she went searching the dim halls of the humanities building until she found his office.

He was at his desk, reading. When he saw her, his index finger froze above the page. She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

He cleared his throat. Did you need something?

She went around to his side of the desk and stood with her legs between his knees. For a moment she thought he would try to pretend not to know why she was there, but he placed his hands on her waist and rested his forehead against her stomach, closing his eyes. She stripped for him, out of the starch and itch of her blouse and wool skirt. Richard unbuttoned his shirt, undid his belt. His mouth was over hers, his hands rough and warm on her skin. Books and papers slid to the floor and Richard breathed a sigh in her ear that sounded like he had been holding his breath forever.

She went to his office most afternoons after class and met him at a motel off campus on the weekends, away from his nosy landlord. The sex was delicious and so were the debriefings in the dorm afterward—her suite mates in bathrobes and towel turbans, hungry for every luscious detail. Mitzi falling back on the bed hugging her pillow as Sarah described making love in Richard’s office while the department chair chatted in the corridor.

Only once did Richard speak of ending it, as they lay naked on the floor in front of his desk. We have to stop this. Other students suspect. They’re claiming favoritism.

She ran her palm slowly along the hollow between his navel and the ridge of his pelvic bone. His breath caught in his throat.

Go ahead and flunk me, she said.

In the late afternoon Sarah walked over to the stone patio in front of the McMullen School’s administration building, where the younger faculty couples held happy hour when the students were on break. From the patio they could look down on their children playing on the broad, sloping lawn below. Shade from tall hemlocks kept them relatively cool. Richard allowed it even though he didn’t come, afraid it might erode his already tenuous authority. Sarah was a regular.

Art Robbins had pulled a blue plastic baby pool up onto the patio and hosed it full of water. Art and his wife Patsy, Catherine Mayhew, and Sarah pulled their lawn chairs close so they could put their feet in. Catherine, whose husband Greg taught math, was seven months pregnant. She tucked her short blond hair behind her ears and swished her feet in the water. This feels so damn good. Across from Sarah, Patsy